Category: Art

With a wildly surreal imagination, artist Rustam QBic from Kazan, Russia creates fish adorned with houses and windows, elephants sprouting giant buildings, and a goose whose feathers are made from a ocean of angry waves. Almost every one of his creations, be it on paper or on a wall is brimming with wonderful ideas and often have to be viewed up close to appreciate their full detail. He most recently completed murals for the LGZ Festival and for Art-Ovrag 2013, and you can see many more paintings, illustrations, and other work over on Facebook. (via StreetArtNews)

Artist Willy Verginer lives and works in a small town called Ortisei in South Tyrol, Italy. His figurative sculptures are carved from solid pieces of lindenwood and often painted with acrylic or accompanied by additional materials. Several of his more recent works as part of a series called Human Nature were on exhibition at Galerie Majke Hüsstege earlier this year and you can see much more of his work on his website. (via Empty Kingdom)

Lora Zombie is a self-taught artist from Russia who mixes street art and grunge influences in her watercolor paintings. This recent timelapse video shows the creation of a new work called Coffee and Milk. Music by Youth Lagoon.

Currently touring several cities in the U.S., The Happy Show by graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, blurs the boundaries between art and graphic design with a great mix of installations, imaginative typographical displays, and interactive artworks. The large exhibition is punctuated with social data gathered from Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Steven Pinker, anthropologist Donald Symons, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as well as several prominent historians. There’s also free gum! And candy! And giant inflatable monkeys! The Happy Show is currently on view at the Chicago Cultural Center through September 23rd, 2013. I’ve been twice now, and you should go too. Images above courtesy Stefan Sagmeister.

Right around this time last year, news broke about the discovery of an amazing little puffer fish capable of creating elaborately designed ‘crop circles’ at the bottom of the ocean as part of an elaborate mating ritual. The behavior was first documented by a photographer named Yoji Ookata who later returned with a film crew from the Japanese nature show NHK which later aired an episode about the fish.

Even as articles bounced around the web it was still difficult to imagine how a tiny fish could create such a large design in the sand, even when staring directly at photographic evidence. Finally, video has emerged that shows just how the little guy delicately traverses the sand in a rotating criss-cross pattern to create a sort of subaquatic spirograph. The textured sand sculpture not only attracts mates but also serves as protection when the fish pair and lays eggs. (via The Awesomer)

In one of his most ambitious artworks ever, artist Isaac Cordal (previously) spent three months constructing a corporate city in ruins for his installation Follow the Leaders. The sprawling collapsed society involves some 2,000 cement figures and decaying concrete buildings that the artist says are meant as a “metaphor for the collapse of capitalism and the side effects of progress.” You can see many more photos on his website (scroll to the bottom), or you can stop by Place du Bouffay in Nantes, France through September 1, 2013. (via Street Art Utopia)

Artist Rogan Brown creates intricate sculptural forms reminiscent of microorganisms, plant life, and topographical charts by deftly cutting patterns in layer after layer of paper. A single work can take upward of five months to complete, and just like the organic forms he seeks to emulate the piece evolves as he works without a preconceived direction or plan. Via his artist statement:

I want to communicate my fascination with the immense complexity and intricacy of natural forms and this is why the process behind my work is so important. Each sculpture is hugely time consuming and labour-intensive and this work is an essential element not only in the construction but also in the meaning of each piece. The finished artefact is really only the ghostly fossilized vestige of this slow, long process of realisation. I have chosen paper as a medium because it captures perfectly that mixture of delicacy and durability that for me characterizes the natural world.